


a friend of loftier mind

by raumdeuter



Series: team spirit [3]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: Animal Transformation, Catstuber: The Fic, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-05 15:18:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6710131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raumdeuter/pseuds/raumdeuter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Before you say anything,” says Thomas, “I want you to know that this is one hundred percent not my fault.”</p><p>The cat squints up at him. He says, “Nrrraaow.”</p><p>[Thomas is magic. Holger is a cat. Or he was a cat. Now he's a kid. It's complicated.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	a friend of loftier mind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Imkerin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imkerin/gifts).



“Before you say anything,” says Thomas, “I want you to know that this is one hundred percent not my fault.”

The cat squints up at him. He says, “Nrrraaow.”

It’s a condition, or at least Thomas thinks it is. He hasn’t quite figured it out yet. Sometimes he just wishes for things, and they happen, without his really meaning them to. His mother says he just has an active imagination, except the things Thomas wishes for become real, really real. Like for instance the time they’d been playing football in PE, and the sun had been shining, and the weather had been just perfect, and Thomas had wished that they could stay outside for the whole day. And then before he’d realized it, they really _had_ spent the whole day outside, and none of the teachers had even noticed anything out of the ordinary.

“It only ever happens near a football pitch, though,” says Thomas. “You should’ve known that. You should’ve stayed away.”

“Mrow,” says the cat.

This is different, though. This isn’t what he’d wished for at all. Except Daniel’s on vacation in Mallorca, and Alex sprained his ankle a week ago, so there hasn’t been anything to do but kick a ball about by himself, even in the rain. And just as he’d blasted the ball in a perfect arc into the net, he’d thought: _this would be even more fun if I had someone to defend against me,_ and, well.

He hadn’t even noticed the cat until it wasn’t a cat anymore, and by then it was too late.

The cat tries to rise to his feet, but he stumbles on too-long limbs and pitches facedown into the mud. When Thomas tries to help him up, he hisses and curls in on himself, like a dying bug. He looks Thomas’s age, maybe ten, with blond hair plastered wetly across his forehead and a glare like he’s trying to bore straight through Thomas’s head.

Thomas just laughs.

“Man, but you look like an idiot,” he says. “Come on, let’s find you something to wear.”

You don’t get to ten in the Müller household without figuring out how to sneak in and out of your room without your parents noticing. The cat has a little bit of trouble figuring out he’s supposed to go through the window once he’s gotten up to the second floor, and he keeps flapping his own hands like he doesn’t know what they’re there for, but they manage all right in the end.

He’s a little shorter than Thomas, and Thomas’s Élber jersey is big to begin with, so he looks even smaller in the jersey, all big sleeves and skinny arms. But he looks kind of right wearing it, in a way Thomas can’t place, although as far as Thomas is concerned, everyone looks right in Bayern colors.

“There,” he says, as the cat wriggles angrily in the jersey, “now you’re fit to go out in public. Try not to get any dead animals on it, I won’t be able to wear it to matches if you do and I bet it’ll take forever to wash out.”

The cat stares at him. He doesn’t say much that’s useful, that cat. But he stops pulling at the jersey after a while, and he drinks the saucer of milk Thomas brings for him, hunched over it protectively, glaring at Thomas the whole time. 

“Do you have a pair of eyes on you, or what?” says Thomas, and laughs again, but quieter, so he doesn’t wake his parents. He’s beginning to think the cat isn’t actually angry, and that’s just how his face happens to look. After all, Thomas wouldn’t blame a pug for looking sad all the time if one became a human.

The cat’s frown deepens for a moment, which Thomas figures is his actual frown this time. Then he finishes his milk with deliberate slowness and stretches out on Thomas’s bed like it belongs to him. He doesn’t look away the whole time, either. Thomas thinks he’s daring him to try and do something about it.

“Suit yourself,” says Thomas, and flops unceremoniously on top of the cat. He yowls in indignation, which only makes Thomas laugh--it’s a funny sound to begin with, and it sounds even funnier coming out of the mouth of a kid. But then he remembers his parents and Simon are asleep, and he tries to cover the cat’s mouth, which doesn’t work, it only makes the cat angrier. Thomas pulls his duvet over the cat’s head to muffle all the noise, and the cat tries to bite him, so he shrugs and rolls the cat up in the duvet before he can react.

The cat finally stops yowling then. Wrapped up in Thomas’s duvet, he kind of looks like a big red and white sausage, with two narrowed eyes peering out of one end. When Thomas leans forward and bops him on the nose, his face scrunches up a little, but he doesn’t look angry, not really. More annoyed than anything else.

“Man,” says Thomas, and pats the duvet. A muffled grumble floats out. “What am I gonna do with you?”

 

\---

 

Sometime during the night the cat must finally have wiggled out of the duvet, because in the morning Thomas wakes up to an unexpected weight on his chest and someone batting insistently at his face. He blinks blearily up at the silhouette looming over him, and for a moment he thinks maybe it’s Simon, but then a voice says “Naaaow,” in a tone of immense longsuffering, and suddenly he remembers everything.

Thomas groans. “What,” he says.

“Naaaow.”

The fridge is mostly empty, and Thomas has to admit he doesn’t have the faintest idea what a cat normally likes to eat anyway. Mice? Yarn? He’s pretty sure uncooked pasta is out, and so is the half loaf of rye in the breadbox, but just as he’s about to give up, he finds a dusty can of tuna at the back of the pantry, and he has to hold back a whoop of triumph.

When he gets back upstairs, the cat is sprawled on his back across the floor. He glances up at Thomas incuriously as he comes in, then goes back to pulling gently at the embroidered crest on his jersey.

“It warms my heart to see you taking an interest in my distinguished club, Herr Cat,” says Thomas, sitting down and setting the can of tuna and a plate on the floor. “We’ll make a proper ultra of you, never fear. First cat in the Südkurve, how does that sound?”

The cat blinks, then shrugs, a complicated gesture. At the first pop of the tuna can, though, he loses all his nonchalance, and he rolls onto his stomach, eyes wide with interest. He watches hungrily as Thomas dumps the contents of the can into a bowl and slides it across the floor. Thomas has brought a fork with him, too, but he ought to have expected that the cat wouldn’t need it. Instead the cat stops the bowl clumsily, with both hands, and sticks his face into the tuna straight away.

“We’re going to need to work on that, too,” says Thomas. 

No response from the cat. Thomas watches the tuna vanish at an alarming rate, and laughs.

 

\---

 

“Okay,” says Thomas, letting the football drop to the to the grass of the pitch with a wet thump. “First things first: learning to run. I can’t have you falling over your feet every time you try and take a step. It’s not dignified.”

The cat looks dubious. Then he goes back to trying to pull his boots off.

“Come on,” says Thomas. “It should be simple for you. Half the feet means it’s twice as easy. You’ll be pulling off sliding tackles before you know it.”

He has to adjust his expectations a little when the cat finally obliges. He runs all hunched over, like he still wants to use four feet instead of two, and his arms are curled up tight against his chest, like he doesn’t know what to do with them. It reminds Thomas a little of the dinosaurs he saw in a movie once.

“But we can work with that,” he tells the cat. “You’re fast enough, and I bet you’ve got the reflexes of a footballer, too. It’ll take a little training, that’s all.”

The cat squints at him and runs his fingers through his hair. He’d woken up this morning with it sticking up every which way, kind of like Thomas’s does, and he hadn’t been too happy about the idea of Thomas taking a comb to it, either. It’s still not completely under control, but at least it kind of looks like he meant to have it look like that.

After a couple more laps Thomas finally gets his football and punts it downfield to where the cat is waiting. It takes a few tries for the cat to understand that he isn’t supposed to try and bat it away with his hands, but then something seems to click and his foot connects with the ball just right, and Thomas whoops as it rises into the air in a perfect arc, turning gently in midair, and thunks into the grass a couple meters away.

Then all of a sudden the cat freezes, all his muscles tensing up, more like a rabbit than--well, than a cat. In the next moment he whips his whole body around and explodes into motion, tearing down the pitch faster than Thomas has ever seen him move. He still looks funny, his hands still curled up into little hooks under his shoulders, but his feet are a blur, his shock of straw-colored hair flying all awry again.

Thomas has just enough time to be surprised before something big and grey bolts past him, barking up a storm, and then everything falls into place. The cat is making straight for the big oak that overlooks the south end of the pitch, the dog hot on his heels. Without even hesitating, he half-claws, half-jumps his way up into the lowest branches, boots and all. For a moment he crouches there, as if a little bewildered how he could have climbed the tree so quickly. Then the dog barks again, and the cat disappears further up the tree.

“I’m so sorry!” says a voice, and a teenager not much older than Thomas stumbles up to him, still holding an empty leash in one hand. He leans over with his hands on his knees for a moment, trying to catch his breath, then looks up.

“She just got away from me,” he says. “Man, I’m sorry about your friend, is he okay?”

“He’ll be fine,” says Thomas. In the distance, the dog is still barking. He thinks he can hear an angry hiss from somewhere in the middle of the leaves. “He’s just….nervous around dogs. He got bit once when he was little.”

“Oh my god, I’m sorry,” says the guy again, “I didn’t--here, I’ll get her out of here, I’m sorry, don’t tell your parents or anything--”

He leaves then, but not before Thomas has managed to extract a couple marks from him in exchange for his silence. Then Thomas tucks his winnings in his pocket and goes to stand at the foot of the tree. He can see the tip of one boot poking out from over a branch, and after a moment a pair of narrowed eyes peer down at him.

“Come down from there,” he says. “The dog’s gone, I promise.”

The cat clutches his branch tighter. “Nnno,” he says, and the sound is so weird it startles a laugh out of Thomas.

“Come on,” he says, patting his pocket. “I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

“Nnno.”

“A can of tuna?”

“Nnno.”

“A can of tuna, and no more football today?”

That seems to work, at least a little. The cat grumbles, but after a moment more of him appears from over the branch, and he carefully begins to slide down the tree. That doesn’t work, of course; the studs of one boot catch on a knot, and he slips and falls the rest of the way with an alarmed yowl, with only Thomas at the bottom to break his fall.

That night the silence between them is a little more frosty. The cat eats the promised can of tuna, but he eats it like he’s doing Thomas some kind of favor.

“No football tomorrow either then, I guess,” says Thomas, and the cat glares.

He keeps glaring all throughout the evening, too, and after Thomas has brushed his teeth and gotten into bed he keeps sitting on the floor and glaring like if he did it hard enough Thomas’s hair would burst into flames.

“Suit yourself,” says Thomas, and rolls over.

But after a moment the bed sinks down, and he turns his head slightly: the cat’s curled himself up against Thomas’s back, a warm and surprisingly solid presence.

“Tomorroww,” says the cat, to the wall, and Thomas grins.

 

\---

 

“I’ll have to give you a name eventually,” says Thomas, one afternoon. “Names are important. Like with Bastian and the Empress in _The Neverending Story._ You need a name to remember who you are.” 

“Don’t wwant,” says the cat. He’s getting better at saying actual words, although sentences are still a little beyond him right now. Thomas hasn’t really thought about how quickly the cat would learn to talk, although it kind of makes sense that he’d have to eventually.

“Yes,” says Thomas. “You’re going to have to meet everyone else eventually, you know. And when you do I can’t very well introduce you as my friend the honorable Herr Cat, who isn’t a cat anymore.”

“Nnno.”

Thomas isn’t sure why Simon or his parents haven’t noticed he’s got a roommate yet. He’d say it was the magic, except he knows the magic doesn’t usually work off the football pitch. He thinks maybe the cat is a little bit magic himself.

“You need a proper name,” says Thomas. “A good solid name that nobody will blink twice at. Like--Tobias, or Philipp, or Michael.”

“Nnno.”

“Too popular,” agrees Thomas cheerfully. “Shall we try something a little more old-fashioned? Something more interesting?”

“Don’t wwant one,” says the cat.

“It’s your fault for not having a collar on you to begin with,” says Thomas, and the cat scowls.

In the end they settle on Holger, though later on neither Thomas nor the cat will be able to remember how or why. But Holger doesn’t seem to hate his new name, and after a while he even smiles when Thomas says it. Thomas thinks that’s a good thing: he doesn’t smile often, so when he does it lights up his whole face, like the sun.

 

\---

 

Summer comes to an end all too quickly, and before Thomas knows it school has started up again. By now they’ve fallen into a kind of routine, he and Holger. He brings up a saucer of milk, a can of tuna, and some bread in the morning and leaves his window open when he goes to school. He supposes Holger wanders out whenever he wants, and does cat things. It doesn’t seem right to keep him locked inside all day, after all. But he’s usually back by the time Thomas gets home from practice, and he fidgets impatiently on Thomas’s bed while Thomas gets out half his lunch and whatever scraps he can sneak from dinner in the evening. Then they go out to the football pitch and kick around for a while, and when they get back home he watches Thomas do homework until he falls asleep on the bed.

It’s nice. It’s not like Thomas has no friends at school--he’s always been pretty popular, having as much confidence as he does will do that for you--but Holger is different. Holger is quiet in a way Thomas doesn’t find unnerving or even uncomfortable. There’s something kind of reassuring about having him at his back. It might be because he doesn’t have any expectations, aside from a daily can of tuna. He’s just--happy to be there.

In fact it’s so nice that Thomas has almost decided to get used to it, and then the scout from FC Bayern comes.

“Don’t know why you don’t want to go,” says Holger. 

He’s doing keepy-uppies in the middle of the pitch with an ease that almost makes Thomas jealous. There’s still something about his posture that feels distinctly catlike, something about the way he launches the ball into the air and lashes out with his left foot, but the way he mock-raises his arms in the air and pats an invisible crest over his heart as the ball swishes into the goal is one hundred percent human.

“I don’t either!” says Thomas. He pulls at the collar of his shirt and grimaces. It’s unseasonably warm for fall, and Thomas has always tended to run hot. “It’s just--wouldn’t you think about it, a little, if you were me?”

“No,” says Holger, as he jogs to retrieve the ball.

“No,” says Thomas, “I guess you wouldn’t.”

It’s not that he’s scared. He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. Most of him is still as excited as he was the moment he spotted the scouts hovering at the edge of the pitch. Why wouldn’t he be? He lives Bayern, he breathes Bayern. The thought that one day he might step out under the lights of Olympiastadion and hear an entire stadium shout his name thrills everything in him.

He isn’t the type to overthink things. This is right. This _feels_ right. But at the same it feels like signing that contract will feel like cutting a string stretched tight inside him somewhere, like part of him is going to be left behind in Pahl no matter what.

“Hey, Thomas,” says Holger, and chips the ball at him. It bounces once, then rolls to a stop at his feet. 

Thomas stares at it blankly for a moment before his vision clears. Then he takes it up automatically and turns for the opposite goal. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Holger charging toward him, and he darts away, laughing, pausing only to nutmeg an imaginary defender.

They race each other down the length of the pitch, alternately teammate and opponent, passing one moment, dribbling around each other the next. Thomas is first into the box, and as he eyes the goal and leans into the shot, the ball suddenly vanishes from underneath his feet and Holger careens into him instead.

Thomas jumps instinctively, but the edge of Holger’s boot clips his and suddenly they’re both on the ground in a tangle of limbs. He can hear Holger laughing in his ear, a wild and reassuring sound. When Thomas pushes him off, he tumbles over his own feet and lies there knocked-out-flat on the grass, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Instead he grins up at Thomas, wide and bright, like a--well, like a cat, a really pleased cat, who’s just had an entire can of tuna all to himself, and at the sight of him a weight in Thomas’s chest lifts, just a little.

Maybe it isn’t about leaving. Maybe it’s about arriving.

“Huh,” says Thomas, slowly, and in the back of his mind, gears start to turn.

 

\---

 

“Okay, I’ll do it,” says Thomas, and the agent looks like he’s about to breathe a sigh of relief before Thomas holds up a finger. “But.”

“But?” says the agent, looking surprised and, Thomas, thinks, a little wary. 

“Buuuuuuuuut,” says Thomas, and he says it slowly, drawing the word out, until the agent starts to fidget, “I want you to do one thing for me.”

The agent stops fidgeting. He doesn’t ask what it is, which Thomas appreciates. He’s beginning to like that--the kind of feeling in the air he gets when something is hanging in the air, like a soap bubble, and he’s the only one in the room close enough to pop it. He lets the moment last just a little bit longer. It’s a little greedy, but he’s starting to like the feeling of that, too.

He leans forward and says, “I want you to let my friend try out first.”

 

\---

 

“And that’s how I got Holger onto the youth team,” says Thomas. “Mind you, it wasn’t all easy. I mean, a kid kicking a football around, that’s fine, but if you want that kid to kick a football around with an Opel logo on his shirt suddenly his parents have to fill out his weight in paperwork. Which is hard when his parents are cats. I mean, I managed it, but seriously, there’s parts of the youth team filing you probably shouldn’t go near in case the magic unravels. It’s potent stuff.”

Philipp stares out at the pitch. Then, very slowly, he exhales and massages his temples. Thomas waits.

After a while, Philipp says, “Why are you telling me this?”

“You’re the one who wanted to know why Holger’s hurt all the time,” says Thomas. “There’s your answer. Morphic resonance, I think it’s called. Sometimes his brain remembers being a cat and he tries to do things in the wrong body, and he isn’t really built for it anymore.”

“Have you tried to turn him back?”

“Nah.” Thomas waves a dismissive hand. “Asked him once, when I thought I’d figured it out--how to turn him back, I mean--but it turns out he didn’t want to. He got used to it, you know? Even ended up getting a dog and everything. Also I think he realized he wouldn’t be able to open tuna cans by himself anymore if he stopped being human.”

They fall silent again. In the distance, Kingsley sets up a picture-perfect free kick, the ball falling so gracefully into the box it almost happens in slow motion, and Robert powers his way past Medhi and rises up to meet it--but Holger is there, nodding it away like it’s an irritating fly, and as he drops smoothly into a crouch he waves at Thomas, who grins and waves back.

“I will say, though,” says Thomas, still waving. “It’s kind of unfair he turned out to be taller than me.”


End file.
